


The Only Way Is Up

by distractionpie



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Hell, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-21
Updated: 2012-08-21
Packaged: 2017-11-12 14:24:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,798
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/492164
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/distractionpie/pseuds/distractionpie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Falling into hell was Adam's destiny, what happens next is up to him. The cage was never designed to hold humans. But Adam was never a hunter and his experience as an archangel meat-suit has left him in no condition to find an escape or beat the demons on their own turf. If Adam wants to escape he's going to need all of his strength and whatever help he can get.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Only Way Is Up

**Author's Note:**

> Notes: Thanks to everybody who helped me get this done, including the lovely mods for being so supportive when repeated computer problems were throwing me off schedule and also to chosenfire28 for being epic and making the most amazing art which can be found at http://chosenfire28.livejournal.com/264021.html despite not seeing a completed version of the fic until the very last moment.

No. No! Nonononononoyes.

Ice and blackness and pressure. Crushing him and tearing him apart. Him? Who? Hurtling through nothing and everything. Then burning. The pressure falling away to the beautiful physical agony of searing flesh, blessed smoke breathing life into stagnant lungs. A bright light. The pressure surging back in, but leaving him empty enough to feel the fall. Falling and falling and emptying until he is a broken rag doll of himself, shattered and shaking and…

Sam.

Michael.

Lucifer.

LuciferfightsMichaelfightsLuciferisSamfightsMichaelfightsLuciferfightsMichaelfightsSamfightsLuciferisSamfightsMichael.

Ripping and tearing and burning and freezing.

He is thirteen. There are trees. Somebody is screaming. His lungs scream. Why can’t he breathe? It’s cold. He wraps an arm around a body. Kicks upwards. Who are they? What’s happening? His shoes drag him down. He should have taken them off. Whose shoes? What for?  
Why can’t he breathe? Why can’t who breathe?

LuciferfightsMichaelfightsLuciferisSamfightsMichaelfightsLuciferfightsMichaelfightsSamfightsLuciferisSamfightsMichael.

Stretching and crushing and falling apart.

Why is she doing this? Teeth rip into him. This isn’t her. She wouldn’t do this. She’d never hurt him. Who is she?

LuciferfightsMichaelfightsLuciferisSamfightsMichaelfightsLuciferfightsMichaelfightsSamfightsLuciferisSamfightsMichael.

Suffocating, choking, turning inside out.

A man. The taste of metal. Liquid on his chin. Shouldn’t have trusted him. Should have trusted them. His stomach entwined with his lungs. That’s not right. Pages and dust and a bitter giddy taste in his mouth. Systems. Respiratory. Digestive. Shouldn’t have trusted them or him but why?

LuciferfightsMichaelfightsLuciferisSamfightsMichaelfightsLuciferfightsMichaelSamisgone.

He’s falling.

Who’s falling?

It’s cold. That’s the first thing he notices. For a long time it’s the only thing he notices. His bones are numb, his skin unfeeling and his mind an abyss. He isn’t aware of the passage of time. He isn’t even aware of himself.

Eventually there is a flicker. A flash of deep ingrained instinct that tells him the permeating chill isn’t right. He remembers his muscles, twitches and shudders and slowly recalls how to pull his limbs in close to him. He cannot remember why he does this but he knows that it’s right. He does not grow warm, but he begins to shiver. He catches fragments of information with his mind, broken and disorganised and puts them back together. It feels right. Familiar.

He is him. He needs to be warm. He needs to move. He needs to remember.

Who is he?

It doesn’t matter. What he knows is enough drive him onto his feet, coltish legs trying unsteadily to replicate motions he can’t recall the details of. He staggers, stumbles, catches himself.

Ice.

That is all he sees. It alarms him and comforts him in its existence. It is an unpleasant thing, but it is a thing, and therefore must be finite. He, who may or may not be a thing, can escape it.

There is light without a source and it casts the shadows of things he cannot see.

He walks.

It’s difficult at first, he needs to stop every few seconds minutes hours days years does time exists when there is nothing there to record its passage. His limbs find rhythm though, rising and falling in time with his chest. This is walking and he can do this, has done this before. He has no direction, cannot find one, the ground beneath his feet arches up into pillars and walls which curve into a ceiling. There are dark shapes in the ice but there are no distinguishing features to them.

He falls down when he tires, slips from consciousness and struggles back up when his strength returns.

Eventually he hears far off screaming.

He knows the sound, can remember how it felt tearing through his vocal chords and ringing in his ears, but can think of no reason to fear it. It is a direction and he follows it.

It is not one voice. It is many. So many. He can’t even begin to pick out individuals and as he find the source the noise makes his ears ache. It’s a familiar pain, that of prolonged exposure to a sound too high and too loud for him to cope with. He can’t recall where he knows it from but it exists in the same distant space in his mind that begs his muscles to recoil in horror, to flee, at the sight of the bodies beneath him. The source of the screaming. They are packed in, tessellating under the ice, with only their faces free to scream. They make it harder for him to walk. Some instinct tells him to step only on the ice, so he can no longer maintain his steady line, instead weaving his way around the exposed flesh. They were his direction, and now he finds himself again walking simply in the hopes of finding something new. He wonders why they scream, how they don’t tire of it, why they make such a cacophony of noise without meaning, at such odds with his senseless attempts to put together the pieces of his mind. He wonders why the snatches of words he hears are ‘please’ and ‘help me’ even when there is nobody there to listen. The eyes which surround him are unseeing and empty of anything except pain. He wonders why they let this happen.

The screams change as he moves, distant noises of anger and hatred mixed in with the fear and desperation. He isn’t sure how he knows this. He remembers something in his head, some sense of something, but when he tries to pin it down it’s too much, a blinding ache between his eyes which brings him to his knees overwhelmed as something like frost falls from his eyes.

If there can be ice with faces and ice without faces then there can be something more.

He staggers.

He staggers and staggers until the faces grow less frequent and the ice is streaked with a new sort of colour, it is dark, and when he next falls down he learns that it is tacky and makes his hands...

His hands…

He has hands.

If he could put the pieces of his mind together he’d be something, but he hasn’t yet caught enough parts to guess at what.

There are more people eventually, these outside the ice, but he never thinks to stop. They have no interest in him but that’s not enough to keep him from weaving and wandering, sacrificing efficiency in favour of keeping his distance from them as they tear into each other. It’s them who stain the ice, all teeth and nails as they embrace devour each other. He that they ought to stop, that there is nothing making them continue to do this thing that he knows is wrong, knows it more surely that he knows he exists, but they don’t.

He gets nowhere when he tries to go around them, finds himself back at the beginning again, or maybe the end, where once again there are faces screaming through the ice. They don’t touch him, don’t see him, do scare him as he works his way through them. The only way out is through.

He walks and shuts his eyes so that he doesn’t have to see what he’s walking through, then he opens them again when horror lurches through his innards at the thought to not being aware of his surroundings. Instead he clamps his hands down over his ears, he has hands, he has ears, he knows how to use them, he begins to wonder how he could forget, and stifles the screams – they’re too loud to be blocked. His arms ache in that position and his legs resist every step he takes, his eyes stinging and his head pounding but eventually the people stop, and he staggers until the ice returns to its glacial semi-transparency - the screams are ahead of him again now.

It’s still cold, and when he crumples to the ground numbness seeps in again, he can’t stop here for long, just enough that his limbs shake a little less as he makes his way through the ice.  
He doesn’t even shut his eyes. He’s far from the teeth and blood and tearing, skin crawling familiar screams of agony, but if he lets his eyes close he won’t be able to control when they open again and if he can’t see, can’t guard himself… well the fate that might bring is worse than the dry sting of his eyes could ever be.

When creeping stillness gets too much he stumbles back to his feet, makes his way forward, not chasing the new set of screams with the eagerness he did the last, but instead with the single thought that there was little which could horrify him more than what he’d just passed through. He couldn’t stay still and he wouldn’t go back.

It’s more frozen people, he discovers as he makes his way closer, upright this time, frozen up to their necks. There is something familiar about the shape they make. Like the others they scream at nothing, begging people and deities alike who cannot or will not hear them. Their eyes are blank, mad, and the ice is too thick and white to reflect his eyes but he wonders if he is really any different to them, screaming at nothing while he staggers his way through them searching for an escape when the only proof of its existence he has is that he wants it to.

Most of the voices are indistinct, screaming high and low, sharp and strained, and they blend together into a cacophony of noise that becomes like silence with its endlessness, bleak and eternal and draining the determination from him until there’s a discrepancy.

“Hey! Hey you!”

He doesn’t pick out the voice at first, it’s drowned under all of the other screams, but it’s clearer, sharper, it has direction. This voice isn’t screaming into the void. This voice is different and different is everything because as long as things keep changing then he can keep believing that he’s getting closer to finding and exit. He looks at the faces properly for the first time, twisted in agony and despair and traces the voice back to something different. The same agony and desperation, but not despair. These eyes aren’t blank, they’re bright and burning into him.

He opens his mouth, tries for something but only manages a rasping noise, more a sob than sense. He doesn’t know how to use his voice, if he has one, to answer the cries. He has hands though, numb and bloody and he scratches at the ice, his blunt fingernails making the tiniest marks. It’s not enough. The voice keeps shouting him though, so he throws his weight against it again and again until it cracks. The ice is penetrable. If he can break through it he can get away from it. The possibilities renew his strength. He tries again. Again and again and again until there is nothing but blood and pain and light behind his eyes and then everything shatters and he crashes to the ground and suddenly there is not a voice from a tortured face encased in ice but a somebody with sharp eyes focused on him and the hair rising on the back of his neck because this is both familiar and unfamiliar and feels very, very dangerous.

But this time his instincts aren’t letting him run. There’s none of the urge to flee that overcame him as he watched the blood splatter the ice among tearing teeth and nails, just something sharp pulling the numbness from his limbs and forcing his eyes to focus. He runs his hands over his face down his shoulders, because if there is somebody here other than him then that creates an urgent need for him to have a sense of self. If there is nothing to make him different then he will simply become another voice screaming like hell.

Hell.

The word rings familiar as he says it, over and over, as he rises to his feet and the other follows him. Hell. Hell. Hell. It feels important. The same rush of something as he gets when he thinks about getting out of here. Hell. Hell. Hell is important. Why? Why? Why? Why?

There is a sharp blow to his face.

For a moment everything his black and white and spinning, and then he can feel the ice under him again.

“Are you done?”

He looks up. Hair, face, eyes, person, question, he blinks.

“Oh for…”

He opens his mouth, chokes, nothing coming.

The person walks away from him, head shaking and hair swinging, a spark of colour and warmth that he cannot lose and so he lurches to his feet, unwilling to be left behind. This place is too big, too full of blank mindless screaming for him to be left alone. He needs this direction. Something to follow. Alone he could wander in circles down here forever, but if there is another then he has a point of comparison, something which seems real. If the other objects to him trailing behind like a second shadow the other says nothing about it and so he becomes a follower in this icy prison, so much easier than trying to find his own direction and he keeps the other in his vision, never so close as to be a threat, never so far as to slip away from him.

The screaming never stops, but he ceases to hear it, letting the numbness seep into his bones and following blindly, sinking back into his mind.

Who he is and how he came to be here, those are mysteries and ones he believes he needs to solve. What there is other that this is a mystery also, but the thought of elsewhere doesn’t cause his skin to crawl in the way that the reality of does so he is willing to accept it as better.

This place has a wrongness about it that he thinks would leave him shivering even if he could alleviate the cold leaching through him, shadows dart and flicker and are cast by everything and nothing and he knows that there is something predatory lurking just out of sight all of the time. He twists and turns even as he staggers after the other, falling to the ice time and time again in his efforts to move fast enough to bear witness to the presence in the corner of his eye.

An eternity passes before he gets a glimpse of what’s lurking but once he’s managed to see he cannot unsee.

The creatures are smoke and darkness and wrong, and they bear down on them toxic and suffocating. Some are formless others like almost like they could be people with hair and eyes.

Now they cannot stalk him they overcome him and he can hear screams but he doesn’t know where they’re coming from. He’s swept across the ice, the smoky forms blocking his view and drowning him. For the first time he can recall he loses track of where he is, his eyes keep snapping open to different places, fire and blood and tearing flesh until everything is still and calm and quiet.

“Well now…” a voice drawls, soft and comforting. An unfamiliar woman leans over him, smoothing his hair and humming soothingly. “You have had an ordeal getting here haven’t you sweetling?”

He opens his mouth to respond but she cuts him off, “No, no, shush, you’re throat must be tired from all of that screaming.”

He’s dazed and his head hurts and his throat aches and the taste of vomit is fresh in his mouth even though he can’t remember being sick. It’s unpleasant and painful but the numbness is gone from his limbs and for the first time he can feel his brain working not in the sluggish empty fashion it has been doing but processing and responding and compensating for his lack of mental frameworks with keen observation because he cannot see walls or floors or ceilings, just horizons, and the word wonderland flickers to his tongue but he keeps it behind his teeth because he doesn’t feel wonder. This woman is gentle and kind and offering him water and salvation but it all feels so very, very wrong. He still hears quiet screaming but he cannot tell if it’s a ringing in his ears or if he’s still closer to the horror than the woman seems to want him to think. She whispers safe, safe, happy, relax, safe, but his wrists are bound by thick knotted rope and he can’t move his legs so when her hand comes to up caress his face again he jerks his head and bites.

The woman laughs and her face twists into something ugly and cruel as she admires him.

There’s something familiar about this, memories flickering behind his eyes, but the pieces are all wrong, he feels like he should know this woman’s face but instead she’s a stranger as she drives the knife under his skin, whispering endearments to his appearance but not to his self. She licks the blood from the blade but marvels at his flinch not the taste. He doesn’t know where these expectations come from but it’s jarring not to have them met. He screams for her, pleads, but he has nothing to bargain and she strokes her hands through his hair, grabs and pulls and twists and then strokes again, pushes the tip of blade under his eyelid and rewards his stillness by jerking it away to slice down his cheek, down his jaw, down his throat instead. She worships him, promises to make him into everything he needs to be to survive and he spits out that she’s repeating Michael’s promise, because she is even if Michael is just a name that stirs him to anger and any promises he made are lost even deeper in the blackness of the boy’s mind than his own identity is. But she recoils at that, spits and stabs one last time, abandoning him with her knife still buried in his shoulder.

Too many screams still echo in his silence for him to trust the reprieve.

He forces himself to take deep breaths, to examine the knots on his wrists. His memories might be absent but the flicker of recognition is there. He has been given lessons on knots and he has enough instinctual memory to know how to twist and squirm and enough pain already coursing through him to ignore the friction burn and the sticky sensation of having pulled too hard, tearing his skin against the coarse material so that blood beads upon the surface and dries tacky, binding him more thoroughly against his will, he fights to just keep systematically struggling on against the pain and on until his he can yank his hands free. He bites down on his lip and then splutters and chokes on the blood in his mouth as he pulls the knife from his shoulders and his fingers tremble even as his grips it tightly and slices at the knots which bind his legs, impatient but unable to rush as he saws through the thick loops of the cord until his bonds fall away. At first he is afraid to move, baffled by the camber of the walls and his own inability to puzzle out where the ground begins and ends. He cannot undergo that again though, so he steps out into empty space and accepts it when he doesn’t fall, remembering crisp pages and lines of print that he’s sure held explanations for all of this. There is no sign of the figure he was following when he was taken and now that his head is clearer he resolves to engage is no more foolish attempts at blindly following unknown entities across this strange and unfamiliar landscape. This place is not safe.

His instincts tell him to move away from the sound of far off screams but they’re coming from all directions and he can’t quite stay away, can only breathe shallowly and hope to pass unnoticed by the torturers at their racks.

Racks, because that’s what they are, he knows that. Torture racks, they are intended for only one very specific process, there is no corruption or mistake here, all of this is intentional. This is a place for torture. For torture and those who enjoy conducting it.

For a second he’s frozen in surprise when he sees a rack that is not actively being used, wondering if there are others like him that have escaped, suddenly fearing a hunt, being turned once more into prey. But the rack is not empty and he’s overwhelmed the urge go over, because he knows that he doesn’t wish what he has just experienced on anybody else, and the fear is stronger than whatever is left of his fragile sanity, but when he gets closer he realises that whatever in on the rack is more thing than man, black-eyed and laughing like the torturers themselves, bleeding but undying and he recoils in disgust because he can feel no empathy for such a creature.

He turns away and moves forward, hoping that the way the screams are louder behind him and quieter ahead means that he’s moving away from center of this nightmare.

He finds the silence before he finds the end of the racks.

There are no screams here. No screams and no laughter. No broken desperation, no warped glee. There is death and nothingness. There is a single rattling breath. There is determination in that breath and it gives him pause. Perhaps he is incapable of learning because he goes over once again and the racks are full of corpses or people that having nothing left inside of them but the woman on this rack draws another struggling breathe and narrows her eyes when he comes into her peripheral vision. “Oh, are you trying again are you? Well then, best of luck to you.”

It takes him a moment to realise that she has assumed he is one of them and it makes him wonder at the blood that covers him, and nausea rises in his throat at the idea. They sicken him. Nothing repluses him more than the thought of becomes like that, there is too little of himself left, and agony is easier to fight than insanity. His hands are skittering over her binding even before he can begin to contemplate the foolishness of his actions. The eyes. It’s the eyes which seem to give them all away and her eyes are alert and defiant. Whatever tortures they have used on her have her tensing at his presence but her words are sharp and her eyes bright and fierce, not the pits of darkness or despair he has seen elsewhere, and she burns with challenge that he wants to turn away from him because this is a woman who will tear apart her enemies. Implements of torture are still scattered around the rack and she flinches when he lifts the knife that still drips with his own blood, but it is the quickest way through her bindings, not the simple rope which held him, but thick metal shackles, vulnerable only at the leather cuffs. She stares at him with disbelieving incomprehension as he works before her expression finally twists into something resembling bitter amusement. “This isn’t as clever of a trick as you might think, I’m not nearly naïve enough to believe that this is actually a rescue. Clever you for moving from mindless brutality to the psychological though. I was beginning to suspect that demons were just stupid, and really, the shame that I might have been outsmarted by a creature that can’t even learn. Save you simple tortures for the likes of Winchester, you have him by now I assume?”

He has no comeback for her clever words, no proof of his sincerity, but he finally works her right hand free and offers her one of the grimy tools that were no doubt used in her torture to work on her left with, while he begins work on her ankles. There is always the possibility she might turn the knife upon him, but he has to believe that her escape matters more.

Whether she trusts him or not she seizes upon the opportunity and for a moment something burns inside of him as he breaks first one set of bonds and then begins to make quick progress on the other.

She doesn’t scream, the only warning he has that her torturer has returned is the sudden widening of her eyes but it is enough. He spins and ducks a blow that would otherwise have hit his spine and brings the blade in his hand up to match the next. He knows he is blundering, his own makeshift weapon not intended for this purpose against an opponent who moves with skill and finesse.

“The throat,” the woman yells, and he sees his opening, lunging up. He’s not fast enough to stop his opponent but he presses the advantage he has, pushing forwards and creating some space to move in. It’s a panicky fight, but he matches the blows with instincts he would never have guessed he had and in the end it’s his opponent who falls first. He shuts his eyes and shakes, adrenaline flooding him with the reminder that this is not a place where he can afford to drop his guard even for a few seconds.

It takes a moment for the words to filter through; the woman is berating him, demanding that he continue his efforts to free her. She points out to him that half escaped as she is she will likely draw further attention, that this place is dangerous and that the enemies are all around. She calls them demons with a certainty that impresses upon his consciousness and so he adopts the word. Demons are torturing people. He has just fought a demon. Demons are everywhere. Demons are dangerous.

Between them they make quick work of the rest of her bindings and, unlike him, she doesn’t hesitate to step out into empty space.

The last stranger he followed led to his capture and he doesn’t know if that was poor luck or if he was lured to the shadows but he has his knife now, dripping red onto the ice, and any sense of direction he had was lost when he was spirited away to the rack. This woman has purpose and a sense of self and scoffs when he follows her but doesn’t use her own newfound weapon to encourage him to leave. She talks instead, because she claims that there’s no way to hide from the demons here, but that she thinks there’s a way out, that she’s the closest thing there is to an expert because she’s had years to prepare and smiles and asks what he’s doing wandering alone in a place like this.

If there is a reason he doesn’t know it but she’s unfazed by his blank stare, says he doesn’t have the look of a demon and she supposes he could be useful if they come across any but what she wouldn’t give for some real firepower.

She calls herself Bela and says she knows how to get out.

All the boy needs to know is that something other than this really does exist.

She isn’t done with the questions though, even as she leads the way she throws assessing looks back over her shoulder and wants to know what he’s seen, where he came from, how he got off the rack, how he ended up on it and he answers as best he can, even though talking about the cold makes him shake and he doesn’t know what he’s going to do with the knowledge

She asks who he is and he says he doesn’t know, so she asks if he knows anything and he shrugs and remembers the rack and thoughts of broken promises and murmurs, “Michael.”

“Michael,” she repeats skeptically, “And you are sure it’s not your name?”

He scowls, uncertain of how to express the feelings that rise in his chest at that name, fear, but mostly anger. These aren’t things he feels towards himself. She thinks he’s stupid, he can tell, and it frustrates him, because he can manipulate the information he has well enough, but before the ice and here there is nothing except feelings and flashes of images and Michael, a bright spark of betrayal. He hasn’t got enough information, and he hasn’t got a context for it, only feelings and memories and confusion because he’s sure he could put the pieces together if only he could look at them properly.

When the ice begins to melt away to stone he feels the relief sink through his bones and Bela frowns with the weight of dread. She asks him what he knows about hell, and he points out that he’s already told her that, but she shakes her head and says, “No, the mythos, the traditional beliefs, the flames...” and he doesn’t know what she’s talking about but he knows that she’s right because with every step of progress they make it gets warmer - and with the warmth the demons begin to once again lurk in the shadows of his eyes.

She kills the first that attacks, and the second, but it’s him that tears into the third when it drops from above. They come faster though, gathering and attacking in groups, and the boy gets quicker with his knife, with his fists and teeth and the fire, and she moves like she’s in her element, laughs and goads and says they’ll never win, and he hopes she means the demons.

It’s almost routine, the way the flames grow create strange shadows on the ice and the attacks that leap from that darkness increase, until the ice and fire arches above them, this borderline where demons surround them and he clutches the blade, longer than his forearm, in both hands and swing and slices, jabs and twists, keeping the figures from ever drawing too close. He covers the right side and Bela, frighteningly efficient in her handling of her blade, covers their left flank, her skill compensating for the harder angle and the way the movements are inverted. The demons are closing in on them, pressing them back to back and they rip their way through the throng, but the flames burn everything and the demons shy away from the wall of fire and so they push and they drag

The flames sear right through him and leave him craving the crippling numbness of the ice, better to sink down into nothingness and the world falls away to the cold than to be charred and melted bit by bit in burning agony. He remembers blue skies and clouds and wonders what it is outside of this that merits enduring the pain but Bela pulls and him and then he at her when her own strength fails because his confusion reminds him that this is her escape regardless of his own hope for salvation and the demons don’t follow them through this and so he pushes through the curling, devouring heat and they both lose time the the ground when they finally fall out of the flames and onto cool, dark, damp stone.

He’s remembering now, the woman who tore him apart was his mother, the men who abandoned him called him brother, the archangel who ripped him from himself and burned his mind from inside out was the one who cast him down. Michael. These are the things he is composed of. But he doesn’t know who he is.

"What happens when we get out of here?"

Bela raises her eyebrows. "Well I was thinking champagne and maybe a five star hotel or a private island for myself. Why, are you planning on searching for a higher purpose in life?"

The boy rolls his eyes, sneers a little because really? "Higher purpose? Why, because it might keep me from ending up back here when it's all over? No. But if we're here then we're dead up there, people don’t just come back from the dead. What about rent and jobs and...”

Bela laughs and the sound rings out bright and foreign through the pit.

“Darling, really? Do you honestly think I don’t have all sorts of back up plans for circumstances in which I appear to be dead?”

The boy shrugs, because Bela talks and talks and so much of what she says doesn’t mean anything to him.

There is no grand door, no leap of faith, no final battle. In the end to get out of hell all it takes is a step. One moment they are staggering bloody and battered though the unfathomable pits of hell; the next they are by the side of a road lined with fields which remind him of the long car journeys of his childhood. There are no landmarks, no signs, but the air is cool and crisp and the sky stretches infinite and fathomless above them, until it meets corn at the horizon. The very feel of the place is different and it is all he can do to stop his legs buckling under him from relief.

He’d fall to his knees if it weren’t for the fact he knows that he’d only have to get back up again, so instead he opens his mouth and breathes, fills his lungs with warm air and remembers how much he hated that, how much he prefered the crisp coolness of winter, but right now he isn’t feeling choosy in the slightest. His head spins because there’s a familiarity to it all but when he tries to move he finds himself paralysed, because for so long the only thing in his head has been ‘get out’ and now so much is rushing in and flooding gaps he didn’t know were there but he’s also got no direction to head in. He presses his free hand to his eyes and tries to focus, to think, to plan, but he can’t so he does the only thing he knows how. He turns to Bela and opens his mouth and looks around them and she laughs.

“What now?” she guesses, “What happens after we crawl back from hell and death and demon kind and onto a dusty highway in the later afternoon sun?”

He nods and Bela says, “I have a plan, remember?” but then she surveys him and adds, “But I’m sure I can find some use for you,” with a smile that suggested that making use of him wouldn’t be nearly the hardship she’d no doubt like him to think. “Have you remembered a name yet?”

He smiles, tightening his blood-sticky grip on the stolen knife.

“Adam.”


End file.
